IN THE REVIEW

The Untold History of the United States

a book and television series by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick

Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s new book would more properly be called The Unlearned History of the United States—if the scholarship and the authors’ reworking of it were thorough, factually accurate, and historically convincing.

American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation

by Michael Kazin

Michael Kazin’s new book about American leftists and their impact on the nation over the last two centuries presupposes, as its subtitle suggests, that this impact has been enormous. But Kazin is a judicious scholar without bluster, a professor of history at Georgetown, and coeditor of Dissent, and his assessments are carefully measured. Kazin concedes that radical leftists have often been out of touch with prevailing values, including those of the people they wish to liberate. He concludes that American radicals have done more to change what he calls the nation’s “moral culture” than to change its politics. And yet, even as Kazin tries to avoid romanticizing the left, his book leaves unchallenged some conventional leftist conceptions about American politics and how change happens.

Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

Theodore Roosevelt, the youngest man to serve as president of the United States, and the youngest ex-president, also died young, at the age of sixty, in 1919. Apart from the four presidents who have been assassinated, only two of Roosevelt’s predecessors, James K. Polk and Chester A. Arthur, died younger …

The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency

by Robert Kanigel

Eighty-two years after his death in 1915, Frederick Winslow Taylor, the industrial engineer whose invention of “scientific management” promised to revolutionize American industry, is largely forgotten. Celebrated during his lifetime for his dramatic schemes to improve efficiency and increase productivity, Taylor was once linked with Thomas Edison and Henry Ford …

The Battle for Homestead, 1880–1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel

by Paul Krause

'The River Ran Red': Homestead 1892

edited by David P. Demarest Jr.

In a year of important American centenaries—Columbus’s landing, the Salem witchcraft trials, the death of Whitman—it may be easy to overlook the lockout and strike at the Carnegie steelworks in Homestead, Pennsylvania, in 1892. Yet the Homestead strike was perhaps the culminating event of the Gilded Age. The stakes were …